It’s the spring of 2021, and the pandemic is beginning to slide away from us in ways that still feel impossible. But there is work to do. There is lost time to make up for.
Even though I have a debut novel publishing this summer, I have been getting rejection after rejection for every literary conference I’ve applied to in the genre of Fiction. There is one esteemed conference left, and so I take a chance and apply for a Nonfiction Fellowship, with a haphazard collection of scenes and traumatic memory interspersed with potentially useless information about pigeons. When I get the acceptance email for the conference, I am cooking dinner.
I check my email after flipping the salmon in the pan and waiting for it to cook through. Our rental is small and the entire place will smell like fish for a good 24 hours. I show my husband the email and it becomes real—that I will fly across the country, then drive two hours south, then attend a conference for two weeks.
It’ll be the longest we’ve been apart. , I say aloud, mostly to convince myself. And my husband agrees, I should go.
When the book publishes, the month before the conference, there will be no in-person tour, only a virtual one that makes me feel “less than.” The weeks and months that follow are full of recording podcasts and writing essays for press and gathering marketing materials and promoting the book. All of this is done in a chaotic nauseous state: half-happy, half-terrified.
I have so many Instagram stor.